Religion Dispatches
…concerned with His relevance to them than any metaphysics. We can only be free if we remove the shackles of faith, these self-ruining feelings of incompleteness, prudery and debasement, and accept the inevitability of our random lives. I don’t mean to be flippant. This is how it seemed to me, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t knock me off my feet. Why spend my existence fighting myself, when I was doing a pretty crap job of it anyway, suffer a…
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On Christmas Day, 2009, as a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam prepared to land in Detroit, passengers smelled smoke and heard a series of bangs or popping noises. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old man from a prominent Nigerian family, was attempting to ignite an explosive device sewn into his underwear. He succeeded only in igniting himself—after his arrest, he had to be treated for second-degree burns on his hands and crotch. Inst…
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…good move. When I got to the lobby another something told me to dig out my phone and check it for messages. Sure enough, I had one from an unfamiliar number. A woman’s voice said Bedi was still sleeping, exhausted from the previous day’s overseas flight, and needed to reschedule our interview for that afternoon. I called the number back, convinced the opportunity was lost. “I’m here at the hotel now, but I’m booked solid this afternoon—” “Hold on,…
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…ory of recognizing that the state can use its power to take away religious freedom.” The kind of religious freedom the panelists discussed, of course, isn’t the Orwellian distortion posed by the Christian Right in both its Catholic and evangelical wings, in which religious freedom is invoked in order to justify the oppression of others, but the liberatory idea of religious freedom for all, including the non-religious, that traditional Baptists hav…
Read More…“Hundreds of ultra-orthodox Jewish men delayed takeoff of a transatlantic flight by refusing to sit next to women, and then caused chaos once it was airborne [by standing in the aisles for the entire flight and refusing to occupy their seats].” Obviously a congested plane aisle isn’t the end of the world (although one can imagine it might be a safety issue in some situations), and the news reports have treated it as a kind of amusing oddity. But…
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…y applied set of economic and political policies premised on the idea that free markets secure freedom and flourishing. Within this framework, nation-states ideally serve as subordinate enablers of capitalism as it forges a renewed multicultural village. This is the subtext for advertising campaigns that advance a not-so-subtle message that conspicuous consumption initiates subjects into an avant-garde multicultural global public. In a context in…
Read More…ost other Christian denominations have done with good results. My own deep reservations about the women’s diaconate come from its very nature as a recipe for a woman’s job in a patriarchal culture. Surely it shores up the current system to have women handling all of the everyday work—visiting the sick, caring for children, helping the abused, teaching religious education, which they do already—so that the men can get on with the preaching, teachin…
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…, the same (almost identically the same) way that Muslim clergy, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, appropriated the Iranian revolution of 1977–1979 entirely for itself, far beyond their own fair share. Free Arabs is right to expose religious anti-intellectualism or fight for the rights of atheists in Arab societies, but their defiance would be much more effective if it rose above colonial constructs of secularists versus Muslims or Islamists. Satirizing…
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…suddenly rushed in from the direction of the security checkpoint and duty-free shops. Like an enormous breaker at the beach, the crowd threatened to sweep up virtually everybody in the terminal. I was first stunned, then joined others in crouching between the benches. I waited there until an official-looking man in plain clothes told us to empty the terminal. People began running in panic, dropping their belongings as they ran. We went down a sta…
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…ed today. And so must the Israeli shelling of civilians in Gaza (the death toll there is now at 13). It’s not a war game, or an occasion for the cold, sophomoric tweet of the IDF spokesperson (or the tweet back by the Al Qassam Brigades). Yousef Munayyer provides some history of the numbers from Gaza at Open Zion: For example, in 2011, the projectiles fired by the Israeli military into Gaza have been responsible for the death of 108 Palestinians,…
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